Tuesday, 25 January 2011

The London Java Community (LJC) is a great network of people in London who mix the sharing of knowledge and experiences in a social environment.I was asked to help out with an Open Conference in November at IBM South Bank, last year and have since offered assistance with the community.

The LJC Associate meeting was held in London to decide what kind of topics we wanted on the agenda over the next few months.This was a great meeting and we managed to get a bunch of topics lined up for the coming months.The current agenda is below:

Zoe and I are currently working on an OSGi pitch to give at the LJC over the next few months also.If you are interested in joining the LJC or attending some of their meets, why not give it a go! More info about the LJC can be found here.

Wednesday, 12 January 2011

Firstly, an introduction! My name is Simon Maple and I work for IBM's development labs in Hursley Park, Winchester. I joined IBM 10 years ago in a test role for WebSphere Application Server (WAS) v5.0. Since then, I moved into development where I worked on many areas for many releases of WAS, including the Transaction Service, Compensation Service and most recently the OSGi feature pack which was delivered on top of WAS v7.0.

I've recently split my role to undertake my existing development role and an OSGi technical evangelist role, in equal share. I will be taking on some of the work Zoe Slattery is currently doing when she retires from IBM in April.

I'm sure my opinion of what a good technical evangelist does/should do will change with time/experience in the role. However, my initial vision is that an evangelist should enjoy working with and believe in a technology so much that they want to increase awareness to generate support for the technology.

OK, let's assume that interpretation is correct for now... How can I achieve that? Well, in IBM we have a wealth of technical minds and talent. It's important not to lock that talent up in the labs, rather unleash it onto a number of mediums, such as conferences, blogging, workshops, tweeting, articles, sample code, webinars etc. I interpret my role as one that helps build the support and following of a technology by increasing awareness via the described mediums or by networking to join up technical resources in the lab to talk and share at conferences etc.

I'll be updating this blog with some of my work and also interesting things I see on my way :o)